This paper explores the effects of civil society interventions in the West Bank that seek to reshape Palestinian women in line with security-driven international aid agendas. Using original field research in Nablus and Jenin, two cities that were historically home to powerful militant factions as well as vibrant Islamic social sectors, I probe the relationship between the proliferation of aid programs designed to ’empower’ Palestinian women, and specific political agendas designed to delegitimize Palestinian resistance. Women’s empowerment, or increasing the role of Palestinian women in governmental and public decision-making, remains a key focus of civil society assistance in Palestine. I argue that these programs seek to cultivate a specific type of Palestinian public feminine, one which is tethered in the growth of of private sector commerce and the public insofar as it advances individual – but not collective – models of ‘success.’ Alongside this depoliticization is a tacit acknowledgement of the sort of Palestinian woman that is less legitimate, through a securitization lens: a woman ’empowered’ by her activism and activity in Islamic social and charitable circles. This paper examines the disjunctures between the policies behind women’s ’empowerment’ initiatives, and the way they unfold in local communities. I found that local women often voice skepticism or outright disdain toward international aid initiatives that are perceived as advancing foreign values instead of addressing their day-to-day concerns. Many women that I spoke with criticized the class of mustafideen, or beneficiaries, that international civil society interventions create, arguing that they contribute to the geographical fragmentation of Palestinians. Older women in Jenin and Nablus that I interacted with expressed a sense of alienation from the art festivals, start-up incubators, and women’s leadership courses prevalent in Ramallah and Bethlehem. Western initiatives designed to ‘empower’ women and drive a wedge between them and political Islam seemed instead to deter many Palestinian women from seeing value in engaging in the public sphere. This paper sheds light on the insertion and solidification of boundaries on Palestinian political articulation, and the ways in which Palestinian women’s subjectivities have been conscripted to the securitization of aid in the age of the ‘global war on terror.’

Jeannette Greven is a doctoral candidate at McGill University in Montreal, where she studies US foreign policy in Palestine in the Department of History and Classical Studies.

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